Best Write-In

Dimitri Cherny

Staff Pick

Lowcountry Democrats didn’t manage to put up a candidate against incumbent U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford in 2014, but thanks to a guy named Dimitri Cherny, voters at least had a choice — and oh, what a choice it was. On the one hand, you had Sanford, a legendary penny-pincher who vows to cut spending and rein in the national debt. On the other hand, you had Cherny, an independent write-in candidate who believes that money is fictional and debt doesn’t matter. Cherny subscribes to a school of thought called Modern Monetary Theory, which is like Keynesian economics on steroids. He told us he wanted to institute a federal job guarantee program, essentially bringing back the Depression-era Works Progress Administration on a permanent basis. Sanford and Cherny never met in a debate, but we like to imagine that the moderator’s head would have exploded.